She
by TexanRose
Summary: In a series of flashbacks, Ezra thinks about how he fell in love with his wife (loosely based on The Girl Next Door).


**Loosely based on _The Girl Next Door _with a much different plot (I like this version a lot better). **

**Ezra is nine years older than Aria.**

**I do not own PLL or any of its characters. **

* * *

Thirteen-year-old Aria Montgomery had been the girl next door for two days before she found the courage to knock on Ezra Fitz's door. She had been the girl next door for a whole month before they became book buddies, exchanging ideas and thoughts on their similar tastes in literature. She had been the girl next door for a year before his routine included her in his home almost every day, making cookies in his kitchen, journaling in front of his fireplace, knitting as she watched old movies with him. She had been the girl next door for two years and eleven months when she said that her family was leaving for an entire year in Iceland, a year where he would be parted from her and the Montgomery family, a family that become his own in the mind of the lonely young man. Aria had been the girl next door for three years and two months when he drove the Montgomery family to the Philadelphia airport and the plane that would take them across the ocean to Reykjavik.

Aria Montgomery had been the girl next door for four years before she popped into his twelfth-grade English class, smiling and confident, recently returned from a year abroad.

It seemed she had been the girl next door forever…until the day that Ezra realized she wasn't a girl any longer.

Calling roll on the first day of the school 2011-2012 year, the names already familiar in his mind…Fields, Hastings, Kavanagh, Khan, McCullers, Marin, Marshall, St. Germain, Shepard, Sperling, Strauss, Vanderwaal…, he noticed an unexpected name handwritten on the bottom of the computer-generated page. He hadn't seen her in his classroom at all. But when he had called it out tentatively, he spotted her sitting at the desk one row over from the windows as she raised her hand in response.

The Aria he saw was not the Aria he had remembered. Her pink-streaked hair was long and brown, she had on dark-bold colors, high heels, chunky jewelry, wore make-up, and he couldn't help noticing that her body had filled out during her time away, taking on a womanly shape and becoming curvy in all the right places. Later on, she would also tell him about the piercings she had gotten and the tattoo she had hidden from her parents.

_ "You think my cartilage piercing is bad?" snickered Aria as she sat across from him in his living room. "That's nothing," she laughed, tugging at her shirt. "Look," she demanded, pulling it and showing him her belly piercing. The ring itself was crystal and silver, but what really had caught him off guard was her slim, bare waist and the neon-colored bra that peeked out from under her shirt when she picked it to show him her mid-drift. _

_ Ezra's mouth had had hung open slightly at the entire sight. "I um," he cleared his throat. "I wasn't expecting that."_

_ She laughed in amusement. "Of course, you weren't," she replied sweetly as she lowered her shirt. "Neither were my parents." _

When the girl next door came back from Europe, Ezra had sensed their relationship changing. She didn't come over to his house every day, she no longer asked for help with her homework, she no longer wanted to come and bake cookies in his kitchen. She spent more time hanging out with her friends, dating that Strauss boy, and getting into trouble with Emily, Hanna, and Spencer; she was constructing a different kind of life for herself. He became the teacher she turned in her homework assignments to, the guy who sometimes came to her parents' house for holiday meals, her mother's colleague, the person who helped her dad shovel out the driveway when it stormed. But when he had gotten that call late on a Saturday night, her slurred words giggling and giving him directions to where she was, he knew that she still thought of him as a friend, someone to bail her out of trouble when she really needed it.

"_How did I get to your house?" asked Aria as she entered his kitchen, her hands clutching her head. _

"_You spent the night here after your antics at the Khan party," he had told her setting some Tylenol and a glass of water in front of her. _

"_Why?" she asked after downing the pill. _

_He replaced her water with orange juice and some toast as he had responded. "Because you called me and you needed help. I went to pick you up." He had explained. _

"_Why didn't you take me home?" _

"_Did you want your parents to see you like that?" he had asked her strangely as he sat across the kitchen table from her with his own breakfast. _

"_No." She sighed. "I'm sorry I stuck you in the middle of this. I know you're a teacher and now you'll probably have to report that you saw minors drinking…" she let the sentence hang before adding another sorry to the end of the statement. _

"_Who said anything about reporting anything?" he had asked her as he started on his second piece of toast. _

"_What do you mean?" she asked. _

_He shrugged. "Last night was a Saturday night, and I was helping the girl next door get herself out of some trouble. That's all. Nothing in that explanation about me being a teacher."_

"_And my parents?" she asked him hopefully. _

"_I told them that you fell asleep in my car after asking me to pick you up when you discovered your friends had left without you. Told them I didn't want to disturb them or you so I just stuck you in the guest bedroom instead," he had told her polishing off the last of his toast. _

"_Really?" she asked hopefully. _

"_Really," he had answered looking into her big hazel eyes. "I might be your teacher, Aria, but I want you to know that I will always be your friend first." _

Their relationship never did go back to the way it was before her family had left for Iceland. But he hadn't expected that. She was growing up now, and it was only natural. But the one thing that never had changed between them, and probably never would, was their mutual love of literature. He might have been her English teacher, and they might have talked books in the classroom with seventeen other teenagers, but on the rare occasions she sat across from him in his living room, he couldn't help but notice that it seemed like she had never left. Those times they were still book buddies…and friends.

"_I read your book," she offered as she curled up on the loveseat across from where he sat in his overstuffed living room chair. "_When Angels Fall_…you did a really good job of writing it; I mean that. It was amazing, and I especially loved the ending."_

"_What did you think of the Ethan character?" he had asked, genuinely curious as to what she would have to say, hoping that she really did like and wasn't saying that to spare his feelings. _

"_I felt sorry for him. The tragedy he witnessed as a child made him into such a complex adult. Do we all turn out like that as adults?"_

"_Like what?" he smirked. "Tragic or complex?" _

_She rolled her eyes. "Complex. Do our lives become that complicated, and more complicated, the older we grow?"_

"_Depends on the life. Ethan's life does for sure."_

"_What about yours?" she asked, half in amusement and half seriously. _

"_It seems to get more complicated every day," he had replied looking at her, thinking about how natural it seemed to have her sitting across from him, wondering what life would be like it were like that all the time. _

"_I had the book was on the top of _TheNew York TimesBestseller_ list for seven weeks straight," she replied suddenly, referring back to his book. _

"_Yeah," he had answered, concentrating on the way she pushed her hair out of her eyes. "It makes me kind of glad it was published under a pseudonym. I might have had to leave Rosewood High because of it, and I love my teaching job."_

"_Do you really like it that much?" asked Aria curiously. _

"_Most of the time," he had admitted. _

"_And the other times?" _

"_The other times," he ground out, nearly unaware of what he was saying as he looked at her, "I find myself wishing for things I can't have." _

He had only thought that she had changed in the year her family was away because she had changed physically and emotionally, shedding girliness as she became womanly. But he had changed too, at least in her eyes. She had called him Ezra from the day they met and she had promised that she and her brother would never call him Mr. Fitz, which was for old people and he wasn't old. He had only been twenty-two, nine years older than her. He was still only nine years old than her, but it seemed the gulf between them seemed to be widening instead of shrinking as they grew older.

She had broken her promise to him the first time she had sat in his classroom and he called roll. Her response had been Mr. Fitz and not Ezra, and for the months after that first awkward encounter, she had either called him Mr. Fitz or nothing at all. Every time she referred to him as Mr. Fitz, it felt like someone had punched him in the stomach. He longed for the days when she called him Ezra, before she was his student, before he was her teacher.

She had slipped up only once in the middle of the school year.

_"Where are you?" she called entering his house. "Mom sent me over to get you for dinner. She mumbled something about you not answering your phone." Frustrated to find that he wasn't in any of his usual spots on the first floor, she climbed up the stair to the second floor looking in all the rooms until she found him in his bedroom, the one room in the house that she had never been in. _

_ He had been sitting on his bed staring at the green wall numbly when he heard her walk across the room, her heels clacking against the hardwood, and felt her sit on the bed next to him as the mattress dipped with her weight. "Ezra, what's wrong?" she asked, the alarm evident in her voice. _

_ "My dad died today," he had whispered and hugged the pillow he had been holding even tighter. _

_ "Oh my…," she whispered back looking at his pale expression. Hesitantly she put her arms around him and pulled him closer to her while had he let the pillow fall to the floor and held her back. They were like that for a while before she got up to call her mom and tell her what had happened. _

Ella Montgomery had known what to do in that situation. She was a mother before she was anything else, and she knew what to do to help her surrogate son cope with what was going on his life. Ella knew how to comfort, and she did it well. Their relationship hadn't changed over the last year, nor had he expected it to. The Montgomery parents, unlike their children, were at the same stage of life that they had been in for the last five years, and they saw no reason to distance themselves from the neighbor they had welcomed as part of their family.

When they came back from Iceland, Byron and Ella had promptly re-invited him to weekly dinners and holiday get-togethers. And Ezra had accepted. Because like the Montgomery parents, his life hadn't changed much either in the last five years.

"_I had never really thought about it before," began Byron cautiously after the family returned from Iceland, "but when Aria came home from school last week, we realized that you were going to be her teacher."_

_We were wondering if that was going to make you uncomfortable," interjected Ella. "You and Aria have always been close, and I know that it can be hard sometimes when those kinds of roles have to change."_

"_I don't think it's going to be much of a problem," Ezra had replied. "Aria is growing up and getting on with her life. I will always be her friend, but I am probably of much better use to her right now as her teacher. No one else at Rosewood High teaches twelfth-grade English," he had joked feebly. _

"_You have always been like family to us," said Ella slowly. "That's not changing, right?" she asked hopefully. _

"_I hope not," Ezra had replied with a soft, sad smile. "You guys are almost all the family I have left in the world." _

_Ella nodded, clearly glad to have that uncomfortable topic behind her and move on to the next point in the conversation, but Ezra had stopped her from doing so. _

"_I'm more concerned what you guys will think of Aria coming over to my house if and when she does. I mean, like she used to before you went away…she's my student now, and I live alone." _

"_What are you insinuating?" asked Byron cautiously. _

"_Aria's like a little sister, but I'm worried that other people in Rosewood won't see it like that." _

_Byron's expression relaxed when he heard Ezra's concern and innocent explanation. "As long as no one is doing anything wrong," answered Ella shrugging nonchalantly, "who cares?" _

The problem was that he didn't see her like a little sister. Her brother he had always seen as a little brother. But Aria was something else entirely and always had been. She was a friend, a confidant despite their age difference.

_ "I really don't like her for you," a fourteen-year-old Aria told him as she talked to him over the fence that separated their backyards. It was a warm spring day and the sun warmed her as they each leaned over the white wooden slabs to talk with each other. _

_ His expression had turned into one of confusion. "I thought you liked Simone."_

_ "I do like her," she reassured him. "I just don't like her for _you_."_

_ "Why not?" he had asked. "She's smart, funny, pretty, and we're the same age. And we like each other in that way," he had added. _

_ She sighed. "It's just that when I picture my life years from now, coming home from college during vacation, things like that, I can't picture you guys happy and married next door. I wish I could," she shook her head, "but I can't. I really don't see you guys having that kind of life together." She sighed. "I'm sorry for saying that." _

Although he hadn't been very happy at the time Aria had told him this, she had been right. He and Simone might have dated for over a year, but they weren't the kind of couple to make it in the long run. And he couldn't picture his life with her either, his house with her things next to his in the bedroom and the bathroom, their children running around the backyard, growing old together on the porch. He and Simone might have liked each other, but their relationship needed to be based on more than that. It needed to be based on love—and neither she nor Ezra really loved the other person.

He found out later she was married to a doctor, Wren if he remembered the name correctly. He had had a run in with them walking down Main Street one afternoon. Simone looked happy, something she was sure she had never experienced with him.

Simone was married, Hardy, his friend who seemed like he to be a perpetual bachelor had also met someone special. Ezra had felt like everyone was moving all around him and he was still and stuck, not able to move forward—not able to move backward either.

All he had were his writing and his students. And he even had the writing of his students which, sometimes, really was a pleasure to read.

_ "Did you write this?" he had asked her, holding up fistful of papers as she stood in front of his desk. _

_ "Why, it isn't any good?" asked Aria, biting her bottom lip in distress. "I knew I shouldn't have done the thing with the unreliable narrator, but it was so much more interesting to write the villain than the hero, and I just couldn't stop myself. I'm sorry," she babbled in worry. _

_ Ezra's had mouth had hung open slightly in surprise. "You think this is bad?" he had asked incredulously. "Are you kidding? It's good. It's really good. I wanted to talk to you about sending it in a young writer's competition in New York." _

_ "Really?" asked Aria in a mix of surprise and pleasure. _

_ "Really," he had replied, smiling. "And if you're worried about your grade, you should know that you aced the assignment." _

Aria had gone on to place in the writing competition which merely drove her to spend more time scribbling in her journal and typing on her computer. She became more and more concerned about getting into a college with a good writing program. Aria wasn't the only good writer in his class; Jenna Marshall had written a particularly riveting piece with a blind character playing both the parts of pro- and antagonist. But Aria was the only student who wrote with a passion that was almost consuming, holding her, giving her a type of freedom that could only be found in those who were able to escape into the secret places of their minds. He had even caught her daydreaming on more than one occasion. He tried not to mention it, but when she did in class, he could not help but reprimand her. He _was _her teacher.

_ "Ms. Montgomery?"_

_ Aria sat up in her desk. She looked up at Ezra, not that she hadn't been looking at him before, but now her mind was aware and her eyes were unclouded. "Yes, Mr. Fitz?" she replied uneasily, almost guiltily. _

_ "Did you have something you wanted to share with the class? About _Persuasion?"

_Aria cleared her throat and pushed her hair out of her eyes. "I think that Anne and Wentworth should have gotten married the first time he asked her."_

_ "Why is that? She did follow the social expectations of her time by turning him down." _

_ "I just think it's funny," she replied shyly, looking down at the wood of her desk and then back up at him. "If Anne and Wentworth love each other, if they mean that much to each other, then they shouldn't care about social convention. They should spend the rest of their lives being happy together; they lost years together because she said no the first time." _

_ "So basically, you're saying that they should screw society," Ezra had said with a smile. _

_ "Basically," responded Aria with a tilt to her head and a gleam in her eye. _

He and Aria might have been struggling to find the line between friend and teacher, but he had thought he would hear the news from her and not from Mike.

_"Score!" cried out Mike, pumping his fist in the air. _

_ "That was a cheap shot," Ezra had exclaimed playfully. He rubbed the sweat out of his eyes and caught the basketball Mike threw him. _

_ "Was not," retorted Mike before he threw another shot. "You're just getting old," he hypothesized before taking a moment to sit on the grass. _

_ Ezra had joined him, looking at the view of the Montgomerys' driveway where the basketball hoop was set up. _

_ "We'll still get to play basketball and stuff together next year, right?" asked Mike suddenly. "Even though you'll be my teacher?"_

_ "Of course we will, Mike," Ezra had reassured him. _

_ Mike sighed. "It's just that you and Aria seemed to have been such great friends before you were her teacher and now she goes to your house less and less. She barely talks about you anymore. I mean, unless it's about school or Mom having you over for dinner or something," he amended. _

_ "Yeah, but that's different," Ezra had said with a half-smile, attempting to find some humor in the situation. "She's a girl. Some people would find it weird if she came over all the time like she used to."_

_ "Soon she won't be here anymore," Mike said nonchalantly. "She'll be in New York."_

_ "New York?" Ezra had nearly yelped. "What's she going to be doing there?"_

_ Mike gave him an odd look. "She got accepted into Columbia. Didn't she tell you?" _

It was then that Ezra realized that maybe he and Aria weren't friends or at least, not the kind of friends he thought they were. He had thought that once Aria had gotten through the school year that they would be the kind of friends they were before the Montgomery family went to Iceland. In the next four months, Aria went to his house only a handful of times and only then at the behest of her mother or sometimes her father. The only books they discussed, they discussed in class or not at all when summer vacation started. Ezra still went over to the Montgomery house for dinner, but those times seemed to be strained between him and Aria. Byron and Ella had been right—by becoming Aria's teacher, their relationship had been permanently altered.

The day before Aria left for Columbia, the August after she graduated from high school, she came over to his house on her own. It was the first time she had done anything of the sort for a long time.

_"Come in, Aria," he had exclaimed, ushering her into the coolness of the house. _

_ They sat in the living room across from each other awkwardly. "Well, umm," Aria cleared her throat. "I came over to say good-bye. I'm leaving tomorrow."_

_ "Yeah," he had replied. "Your dad told me about it."_

_ "Do you think I'll be okay?" she asked suddenly, her hazel eyes large as she looked up at him. _

_ He had sighed in slight exasperation. "Of course you will. You're one of my best students."_

_ "Not _the_ best?" she asked teasingly, an eyebrow raised. _

_ "Okay," he had admitted ducking his head. "You are the best. Just don't tell Spencer I said that." _

_ She laughed, a clear, ringing laugh that filled up the room. When he heard it, he had realized that he hadn't heard her laugh like that in a long time. "I promise I won't."_

_ They both got up and Aria walked over and embraced him in an awkward hug. "I wish you could come with me," she whispered softly. _

_ Ezra had disentangled himself from her before looking at her and shaking his head. "It doesn't work like that. You can't pack up your high school English teacher and take him with you to college."_

_ She took a step back and mumbled something with the words more and teacher before saying, "I don't like saying good-bye. You know that." _

_ "I know."_

_ "Remember when I said good-bye for Iceland? That was awful." _

He remembered as if it were yesterday, dropping the Montgomery family on the curb in front the airport in Philadelphia. He had given each family member a hug, saving Aria for last. She had hung onto him tightly before letting him go, tears falling on the front of his shirt. Aria had never been a big person for change. She liked her life neat, orderly, and predictable which is why he had been surprised to find that she wasn't coming home for Fall Break or Thanksgiving vacation, opting to stay at school instead. He supposed she had friends up there, a whole new life that was exciting and fun and different from boring old Rosewood.

She had come home for Christmas, but he didn't see much of her at all. The only exception was the Montgomery family Christmas dinner which he had been invited to. Aria seemed to only have grown lovelier, more womanly during her time away from home. The green dress she had worn for dinner hugged her curves perfectly, and he had found himself wondering how much time it took to style her hair so that it fell in perfect waves down her back. He hadn't remembered much about that Christmas, but for some reason, he had remembered Aria and how beautiful she had looked that night, so very different from when she knocked on his front door that first time as a thirteen-year-old girl.

He surprised her at school one week. Not that he was really surprising her; that was just a bonus. He had been asked by Columbia's English department to give a lecture in preparation for his second book which was about to come out in print. During that first lecture, he spotted her in the crowd, near the back of the auditorium wearing a cheetah-print sweater.

_"It's good to see you," she exclaimed coming up to hug him after the lecture. _

_ He had laughed and hugged her back. "You to."_

_"And I'm so excited for your new book," she told him when they pulled apart. "What are you calling it again? _All For Her_?"_

_ He had nodded and then reached into his satchel before giving her a hardback. "Shh, don't tell anyone I gave you a copy. It's not in stores yet." _

_ She smiled brightly before stuffing the book in her purse. "This is Adam," she said, gesturing to the boy next to her. "He's an English major here too." _

_ "I'm so excited to meet you Mr. Harding," the boy exclaimed. "I can't believe that Aria knows you. Although…she never did mention how she met you," he said slowly looking back and forth between the pair, a hopeful expression on his face. _

_ "Mr. Fitz was my twelfth grade English teacher," Aria responded quickly. She put her hand in the boy's, and that's when Ezra had realized that Adam wasn't just Aria's friend. _

_ "Fitz?" asked Adam scrunching up his face. _

_ "Yeah, Ezra Fitz," replied Aria. "But that's a super big secret no one is supposed to know. He goes by Ian Harding when he talks about books. It's his pen name." Her expression became stricken. "I wasn't supposed to tell anyone that."_

_ "It's okay, Aria," Ezra had reassured her. "I'm sure Adam here will keep my little secret." _

When he returned home, he found that he was upset. He was upset at Aria, at the Montgomery family, at life,…and at himself. Aria still thought about him as her high school English teacher. She didn't think about him as the guy next door, her friend who she used to talk to and laugh with. He had thought things would go back to some semblance of the way they were before she was his student. He was wrong. He was still Mr. Fitz; he wasn't sure if he would ever be Ezra again.

So Ezra stopped thinking about Aria. She was gone in New York most of the time anyway. He focused on this year's batch of students, his next book. He focused on the people who were his own age—his colleagues, his friends, and Jackie Molina. She was an assistant professor at Hollis College, where Byron headed the history department. They met through Byron, and dated on and off for the next two and half years.

Jackie was everything he thought he wanted in a wife. She was smart, beautiful, could converse intelligently, wasn't afraid to give her opinion, was at home in his home, and her specialty was in psychoanalysis and literary theory. She was slightly cold to the people who didn't know her well, but that wasn't a personality trait that tended to bother him overly much. He thought she was the person he was going to marry until the night that everything he had built for himself over the last three years began to crumble.

_ "Who is she?" asked Jackie angrily, holding a fistful of papers in the air. She let them go, and they fell onto his living room floor in a puddle of white. _

_ "Who is who?" Ezra had answered confusedly as he bent down to gather the papers. _

_ "The girl you're in love with," exclaimed Jackie impatiently. _

_ "I love you. I'm not in love with anyone else," he had told her straightening up, a page in his hand._

_ "Then explain that," replied Jackie angrily, pointing to the page in his hand. _

_ He had read the first few sentences before his eyes widened. "This is a draft of my new book. Did you hack into my computer?!" he had cried. He didn't get angry often, but Jackie was really pushing it, and the argument quickly snowballed into the biggest of all the fights they had had. _

_ "Who is she?" demanded Jackie. "I have a right to know." _

_ "There is no one else," Ezra had hissed. "This is a work of fiction. She doesn't exist!" _

_ Jackie took a deep breath and calmed herself down. "I knew you didn't love me, but I was okay with that because I knew there was no one else. I _thought _there was no one else. But there is, and she's somewhere out there." She shook her head coolly. "This isn't going to work."_

_ Calmly, her emotions practiced and tight, Jackie Molina walked out of the front door of Ezra's house, and never walked back into his life again. _

She never returned the ring. Not that Ezra had particularly wanted it back, but he thought the polite thing to do was to return it. Instead, he had tried to forget her. He tried to forget the last three years. He threw himself into his writing. He dabbled in poetry. His first real success with that genre was a poem titled _B-26_. He had written it late at work one night, the silence of the Rosewood High hallways and the buzzing fluorescent lights ringing in his mind. Like his latest book, it was also about a girl, a girl who used to sit in a high school classroom with its confining desks and stifling air, one row over from the windows that could open into the outside world.

Change had hit Ezra like a ton of bricks. Jackie walked out of his life while he shut and locked the door behind her. Hardy moved to Baltimore. Mike was enrolled at the Penn State. Aria graduated from Columbia. Byron and Ella decided to move to Iceland on a more permanent basis. Even Mrs. Welch was retiring and moving to Florida. Ezra felt like he was in the same spot he had been in five years ago. Everyone was moving on with their lives, and he was stuck—he couldn't move forward, but he couldn't go backward either.

But then Aria walked back into his life.

_Principal Hackett walked into Ezra's classroom the day before the start of the new school year. Ezra had been surprised by the visit; Hackett was the kind of boss who liked to stay in the comfort and insulation of his own office. _

_ He had looked up from the pile of papers on his desk and at his boss. "Can I help with something?" he had asked politely. _

_ Hackett cleared his throat. "I wanted to introduce you to the new teacher we're adding to your department." He looked at Ezra pointedly and then at the woman next to him. _

_ "This is Aria Montgomery. She's going to help you with twelfth-grade English. I told Ms. Montgomery that she was overqualified for the job. She's recently graduated from Columbia and is in the process of getting her first book published, under the name L.K. Hale that is," added Hackett. "She prefers to do her writing anonymously. But insisted that she really wanted this job."_

_ When Ezra had finally registered the woman standing next to Hackett, he did a double take. Aria had changed so much in the last three years. All traces of girlhood, and of shyness, had fallen away. Wearing a black pantsuit and a purple blouse she looked confident, secure, and all grown up. And he had only been able to think of one thing to say. "What's the name of your book?" _

_ "_Because of Him_," she answered softly before enveloping him in the big hug she hadn't given him since the day he lectured at Columbia. _

When Aria re-entered his life, it was like that last five years had never happened, evaporating into thin air. They spent their time talking, talking at work, talking a home, discussing, describing, and even gushing about the things that had taken place over the last few years. And she finally told him how she had ended up as a teacher at Rosewood High.

She told him it had been the logical thing to do. She had liked New York, but she loved Rosewood, and she had always wanted to come back home. Her parents were moving to Iceland so her dad could teach there, they needed someone to watch the house, and there was a job opening at the high school.

He had read her book too, the copy she gave him before it was available in stores. It was hauntingly beautiful and achingly sad in a way that showed him what a truly talented writer the girl next door was.

And she was the girl next door again in more ways than one. She spent time at Ezra's house and he in hers. They ate dinners together, watched movies together, graded papers together, and sometimes rode to work together. Their classrooms were even next door to each other. And a pain in Ezra's chest began to melt as he realized that he and Aria were friends, just like they used to be.

_"So no special guys in your life?" he had asked her one night over pizza, popcorn, and a movie. _

_ She took a bite of her pizza before turning to him and elbowing him in the ribs. "You're my guy."_

_ He had shaken his head. "No, really. Any boyfriends? Someone you left behind in New York?"_

_ Aria took another bite of her pizza before responding. "Well, you remember Adam, right?" He nodded and she sighed. "Well, after Adam there was Chris and then Jon, then Steve, Wes, Jesse, Zach, Justin, Nick, and Brian. So no. There's no one special in my life." _

She had looked so miffed when he asked the question, that he decided never to discuss her love life with her again. Instead, he focused on the good times they had together, the friendship that blossomed between the two of them. He had originally thought that it was going to be like it was before she went to Iceland. But it wasn't like that at all.

It was better.

Before Aria had left for Iceland they were buddies. Now, they were companions. And their relationship, while strictly platonic, was rooted in adult feelings and experiences instead of mashed up childhood ones.

And he did suppose he was her "guy." They did everything together, and he had even heard students speculating about whether Ms. Montgomery and Mr. Fitz were dating.

When Aria's book was released to rave reviews and a sudden cult following, Ezra took her out to celebrate in the Philadelphia. The restaurant was the kind of place, he had supposed later, where someone might propose to the woman he loved, a place for lovers and spouses. And Aria had looked the part. She was stunning in a tasteful dress made of black lace that was deceivingly modest with cloth that covered only the most essential areas of her body.

No, Aria Montgomery wasn't a little girl anymore.

_"The champagne is excellent," said Aria as she started on her second glass. _

_ "Good," he had smiled. "We're celebrating."_

_ "The fact that I'm a big girl writer, right?" joked Aria. "Because the waiter keeps looking over here like he's waiting for something."_

_ "He probably thinks I'm going to propose," he had responded dryly. "I'm guessing this is the kind of place where that kind of thing happens a lot."_

_ "Well, why don't we?" asked Aria._

_ "Why don't we what?" he had parroted uncertainly. _

_ "Give him a show," she replied, tucking her hair behind her ear. Before he could respond, she leaned over the table and gave him one of the best kisses he had ever had in his life. _

_ "And that was?" he had asked her dumbly as she settled herself proudly back her chair. _

_ "The show the waiter wanted." She looked up at him innocently through her lashes. _

_ "Did you have to be so convincing?" he had asked, rubbing his hands over his mouth. _

_ She shrugged. "The kiss was for him, the convincing part was for me." _

They had barely spoken a word to each other on the way back to Rosewood. She stared out the window into the black and starless night and the rain that streamed down the windows. Instead they went back to their separate houses alone instead of going into his for a nightcap like they would have under normal circumstances.

He felt hollow inside as he made his way up to his bedroom. It wasn't because she had kissed him. It was because he wanted to do so much more than that to her. He wanted to kiss her senseless, to take off all of her clothes, to love her until she knew that he wanted to be in her life for always and ever.

She was the girl next door. She had been his student. She couldn't be his lover.

Or so he had thought.

_When the doorbell rang sometime in the middle of the night, long after he had gone to bed for the night, it woke him from oblivion. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he had walked downstairs, listening to the howling storm that was taking place outside. _

_ It was Aria standing on his porch, wearing the same dress that she had worn to dinner, soaked to the bone. She was clutching something. _

_ "Why?" she shouted at him. _

_ "Why what?" he had asked, awake, alert, and suddenly angry. _

_ "Why can't we be that couple, Ezra? The kind that goes out and gets engaged and is deliriously happy? I've been trying so hard, so very hard," Aria suddenly burst into angry tears and pounded him in the chest with her fists. "Why?"_

_ "I think you need to go home," he had told, attempting to be as calm as her could, his jaw clenching. _

_ "No," she cried, wriggling herself out of his grasp. "I want to know why? Why can't we be together? Why can't you admit we like each other?" She glared at him, her rain-soaked hair plastered on her face. _

_ His breathing had become irregular and uneven as he had suddenly shouted back at her, "You were my student, Aria. That's why." _

_ "Who gives a damn?" she yelled. "That was five years ago. Five damn years ago, Ezra! Nobody cares. I'm twenty-three-years old. So what? So what?" she sobbed. _

_ "I do!" he yelled back. "I met you when you were thirteen, Aria. Thirteen! And I was twenty-two. What kind of person does that make me?" _

_ "The man I love," she shouted back at him. "I've been in love with you since I was seventeen," she confessed. "I'm not that little girl, not any more Ezra, and this isn't some crush. I've tried to forget you, and I can't! I can't! I stopped talking to you, I moved away, I called you Mr. Fitz, and these feelings won't go away. I came back for _you! _Tell me you don't feel the same way about me," she challenged him. _

_ "So what if I do?" he had asked her, voice trembling. He had always been so afraid to admit it. Which was why he never had…until then. "So what if I want to hold you close to me, never let you go, be with you all the time? Nothing can come of it." _

_ "It can if we want it to," she retorted angrily, her chest heaving. He was silent as thunder crashed in the background and lightning flashed, illuminating Aria's face which was full of conflict and desire. _

_ They leaned in before their lips met, devouring each other hungrily. _

They had barely made it to the bed that night. The more they had tasted of each other, the more they needed in an insatiable hunger that drove them into the passionate throes of early morning leaving broken lamps, shattered vases, and crushed knick-knacks in their wake.

Ezra knew that life would change after she came back from Iceland. He had forgotten to account for the fact that would change too. She wasn't growing up. She _was _grown up.

After that night, after they had talked and cried and whispered and yelled and sobbed and shouted at each other for days about the other's misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and mistakes, they were nearly inseparable. They did everything together, couldn't go five minutes without touching the other, and more than anything else, they loved each other. In time, it wasn't about whether students were speculating on whether or not Mr. Fitz and Ms. Montgomery were dating, but rather what Mr. Fitz and Ms. Montgomery were doing together over the weekend and when Mr. Fitz was going to propose to Ms. Montgomery.

_"Does it feel strange to you?" asked Aria as they walked along Main Street. She looked down at their hands, hers was in his, and their intertwined fingers. "Walking like this in broad daylight?"_

_ Once the fact that he was holding her hand the way a boyfriend would, showing his affection and partnership in such a way that all of Rosewood could see, would have bothered him. "No," he had answered her honestly. "It feels right."_

_ She squeezed the hand she was holding and gave him a peck on the cheek. He had smiled in response. _

Ezra was more than willing to admit that he was in love with Aria Montgomery. And in love with the way a man loved a woman, a husband loves a wife. She was his everything. She was his sounding board, his co-worker, his editor, his dinner partner, his lover, his friend, his neighbor, his girl.

He had been right. Jackie was everything he had thought he wanted in a wife.

He had also been wrong. Aria was everything he didn't know he wanted in a partner. And that made her perfect.

Aria was his everything, including his roommate. They went between houses, his and her family's, back and forth, never really settling in one or the other. But where she slept, he slept next to her and where he lived so do did she.

They hadn't really thought that through when an unexpected visitor popped up. In retrospect, Ezra knew that he really should have known better.

_He hadn't heard the knock on the door or the key in the lock, the thumping sound that luggage made as it was being dropped, or the heavy footsteps of an adolescent boy as he ran up the staircase, So both he and Aria were still sleeping when Mike Montgomery opened the door to Aria's bedroom at the Montgomery house, surprising his sister with a visit after driving all night to get home. _

_ "What's going on?" he nearly shouted after he found Aria and Ezra together in Aria's bedroom. It was a Saturday morning and they had both slept in. Aria curled up on the side of Ezra's body, using his arm as a pillow. _

_ Ezra had sat up in the tiny bed instantly, his movements disturbing Aria who mumbled her own, "What's going on?" as she rubbed the sleep out of her own eyes. _

_ Mike stood in her bedroom door, bleary-eyed and upset as his sister got out of bed and tried to calm him down and explain the situation. _

In the end, Mike had taken the news well. Actually, he had taken it more than well. When the situation had been explained, he gave the couple a gleeful smile and asked when the wedding was. Ezra had groaned at Mike's delight, and asked the younger man not to say anything to his parents until he and Aria had figured a way to tell them on their own.

_"You love her don't you?" asked Ella when she and Byron came back from Iceland for a vacation. _

_ He had nodded carefully before asking quietly, "How did you know?"_

_ Ella smiled softly and then put her palm on his cheek and rubbed the stubble there with her thumb. It was a gesture he had seen her do a hundred times with Mike, a motherly one. "You've always loved Aria. I knew that. I was just waiting for you to figure it out." Ella looked out the window to where her daughter was reading on the back porch. "And from her expression, I guess she finally figured out she loves you too." She sighed. "Mothers know more than about their children than they do sometimes." _

_ Ezra had been silent for a moment when Ella pulled her hand away. "Is that okay?" he asked cautiously. _

_ "Are you worried about your age difference?" asked Ella "Or what Byron and I think about it?"_

_ He had swallowed. "Both. Everything. All of the above." _

_ She smiled at him again, wider. "I was hoping it might happen someday," she paused a moment before continuing. "There have been stranger stories." _

He loved her; he knew that. And he knew that she loved him. And Mike was okay with it. And Ella was happy about it. Of all the people who Ezra had been the most afraid telling the news to, it had been Byron. But he took it all in stride, with a clam demeanor and a glass of scotch in his hand.

_ "Ella tells me you love Aria," said Byron with a steely look as he sat across from Ezra and sipped his drink. _

_ "I do," he had told the older man with more calmness and confidence than he felt. _

_ "Do you plan to marry her?" asked Byron, leaning back in his chair with ease. _

_ Ezra had swallowed and then answered. "I do," he had told Byron, although the answer was unexpected and a surprise to his own ears. _

_ "And you think you guys will live next door, then?"_

_ "Yes," Ezra had said as he began to picture their life together, Aria's things next to his in the bedroom and the bathroom, their children playing in the backyard, growing old with her on the front porch. It was a good picture. _

_ "And you will both work at Rosewood High?"_

_ Ezra had been pulled out of his daydream suddenly by Byron's next question. "Umm, actually, there's something you should probably know." He had taken a deep breath. "My books, you know the ones written under the name Ian Harding, have been so successful that I probably don't have to work another day in my life and for that matter neither does Aria. She can quit her job if she wants and write full time."_

_ "But you will still continue to work?" _

_ "I love teaching," Ezra had responded with a shrug of his shoulders. "I know it sounds strange, but I like my job. But Aria should have the choice if she wants it." _

_ Byron studied his potential son-in-law intently before sighing and holding out his hand to shake Ezra's. "You have my blessing." _

Byron had walked Aria down a church aisle five months later. That day he and Aria were joined in holy matrimony, became one, were officially husband and wife, partners for the entire world to know and see.

But it was merely a formality because Aria had been his for much longer than he could remember.

And he had been hers too.

Looking down at his wife, Ezra Fitz sighed in contentment as he gathered her sleeping body in his arms and smelled the scent of her hair. She always smelled like lavender and roses and home, that one indefinable and familiar feeling.

And they were home, his home, her home now, and in their bedroom with green walls and the things that make up a life. His notebooks were scattered all over his dresser. Her clothes were in the closet. His robe was draped over the easy chair. The book they had written together, under the names Ian Harding and L.K. Hale, entitled _Together_, was next to him on the bedside table. Their wedding photograph hung over the bed. And next to Aria on her bedside table was a framed piece of paper that was crumpled, rain-soaked, and nearly faded. It was what she had been clutching the night that she knocked on his door crying. It was the dedication page to her first book, a page he hadn't bothered looking at, at first. The words, nearly illegible, read _You Are More than Just My High School English Teacher. _He knew that now.

He looked at all these things, and thought about the last ten years of his life, and then he looked down at his beautiful wife in silent adoration by the glow of the early morning light.

"You're staring at me," mumbled Aria, shutting her eyes tighter.

He laughed softly before giving her a warm kiss on the cheek.

"Oh," she gasped sitting up and putting her hands on her middle. "The baby," she exclaimed. "He's kicking. Here, feel," she said quickly grabbing her husband's hand and placing it on her belly. She sighed happily. "He must like your kisses."

"She must," said Ezra placing a rather large one on Aria's lips.

She kissed him back before pulling away. "She?" asked Aria pointedly.

Ezra shrugged. "I still think it's a she?"

"You do, huh?" harrumphed Aria as she leaned back down into the pillows. "And what are we going to name _her_?"

"Hope," he told her with a half-smile.

She shifted to turn and him, and they faced each other in the bed. She rubbed her hand over the side of his cheek, feeling his stubble as he kissed her palm. "I like it," she finally said. "But I still think it's a boy."

"Well, then, what are we going to name _him_?" asked Ezra teasingly.

"I thought about Ethan," she told him softly.

"I like that name too," said Ezra.

They were quiet for several minutes as Aria turned to her other side and was gathered in her husband's arms. "Does it matter?" asked Aria. "If it's a boy or a girl?"

"You know it doesn't," he answered, whispering into her ear. "We'll love our child no matter what."

And then Aria thought about their life together: the ups and downs, the joys and sorrows, the laughter and tears, the hope and despair, the waiting and the rushing, the dreaming and the torture. The love and the heartache.

Aria sighed in contentment and added, "And love each other."

"And love each other," Ezra reassured her giving his wife a kiss on the cheek as he imagined the next ten years of their life. Because she wasn't the girl next door any longer. Now, she was the woman who had promised to be next to him for the rest of their lives.

* * *

**I like this much better than the original story because Aria and Ezra don't get together when she is a student, something that bothered me when I wrote the original characters (even though we love that plotline in PLL). **

**I'm thinking about changing the details and names and making it a more original piece. What do you think?**


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